Arts
‘I feel compelled to be disgraceful’
Miriam Margolyes chews the fat with Tanya Gold about mother love, anti-Zionism and too much shagging
‘Opera is something you come to later’
After a record 18 years – and counting – as music director, Antonio Pappano talks to Norman Lebrecht about life after Covent Garden and how opera is beyond younger audiences
Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
Grade: B The old axiom no longer applies. In modern popular music, it is possible not only to gild a…
Eurotrash Verdi
Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a…
Seeking closure
As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in…
Changing the bard
A Moorish princess shipwrecked on the English coast disguises herself as a boy to protect her virtue. Arriving in London,…
This will hurt
Pina Bausch’s best work always hovered between the familiar and the unknown. The late choreographer revelled in borders and thresholds,…
It’s grim up north
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to…
What a scorcher
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th…
Trent Dalton
He’s barely in his forties. He’s married with two nearly teenage daughters. He lives in Brisbane. He’s a staff journalist…
Bruce Beresford at home in Birchgrove 2018
Sydney’s Archibald has the name and the fame, but there is a new kid on the block: the Darling Portrait…
On the offensive
Mark Mason talks to Clive Anderson about mistaken identity, Macbeth and making a career out of being a bit of a smartarse
Made for telly
It’s a sweltering night in Manhattan, circa 1947, and on the doorstep of a brownstone tenement three women are waiting…
Running on empty
Steve McQueen’s ‘Static’ (2009) impresses through its sheer directness — and it’s very far from static. A succession of helicopter-tracking…
Beckett would approve
An office worker stands on the ledge of an open window about to leap. Two colleagues enter, ignoring him completely.…
The appeal of psychopaths
Ever since the end of Gomorrah season four (Sky Atlantic) I have been bereft. I eked it out for as…
Justin Bieber: Changes
Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of…
Greed is bad
Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to…
Lost in translation
You won’t find much Jane Austen in the myriad adaptations of her novels, says Claire Harman
Vol-au-vent horror
Not much was clear in the opening scenes of The Pale Horse (BBC1, Sunday), which even by current TV standards…
Family matters
History will record Leopoldstadt as Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List. His brilliant tragic-comic play opens in the Jewish quarter of Vienna…
Local hero
Blood Wedding, by the Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, is one of those heavyweight tragedies that risks looking a bit…
Wigging out
British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still,…
Fellatio-free
Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur…
Tinkerbell Regency
‘Too pretty,’ blithers Miss Bates in the Highbury haberdasher as she plucks at a silken tassel. ‘Too pretty’ goes for…
